Surprise...surprise!

"You're going to want to sit down for this..." the plumber said on the phone to Andrew last night. 

Our water heater had stopped working. The plumber asked what year our water heater was installed. 

"2005..." Andrew said, and that's when he was told to sit down. 

Evidently the life of a water heater is not typically so long. The recommendation: a new water heater. 

Of course. 

So the plumber came this morning and he was like, "Wow! I haven't seen you guys in a long time!"

And I was like, "Thank goodness for that!"

It's been about two years since our last plumbing emergency. Our plumber laughed and said, "Yes—plumbers, dentists, lawyers...all people you never really want to see!"

So, as of today we have a brand new water heater. It's smaller than our old one (which was massive—75 gallons), but is function (which is helpful for running a household of this size). The price tag was a bit of a yikes (which is why we downsized) but, you know, we were living on borrowed time with that thing, I guess. 

These surprising and costly fixes are...getting a little less surprising as time wears on. 

Andrew had stayed home from campus this morning so he could deal with the plumber because ironically we always need repairs when Andrew's at campus. It's really quite funny—like even if we schedule a repair for not a Thursday they will inevitably cancel for some reason and say, "How about Thursday?!"

(Okay, it probably doesn't always happen that way, but it happens and absurdly frequent amount)

So he was like, "I'll just leave for campus later so that I can be the one to deal with this..."

And he did! Which was good because I had a morning meeting.

With the new water heater in place, Andrew got ready to go to campus, opened the garage, backed his car out, closed the garage door, and drove off.

About twenty minutes later I was getting ready to leave for the dentist. 

I went out to the garage, pressed the button to open the garage and...it lurched...and stopped. 

Lurch. Stop. Lurch. Stop. Lurch. Stop. Lurch.

Obviously the button wasn't going to open anything.

I tried to open it with the emergency release but am apparently not skilled enough to do that (and was beginning to worry about the amount of time I had spent investigating the garage door versus time spent driving to the dentist) so I just grabbed Rachel's car keys and took that car to the dentist since it was already parked outside (up in the cul-de-sac because the plumber was in the driveway when the girls got home from seminary).

After I got home from the dentist I did a little more research and investigation into the garage and determined that our spring had broken—snapped right in two. So now we get to fix that!

Our house is just full of surprises!!